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Congrats On Your Vote, Too Bad It Probably Didn't Count

My fellow Americans, today we choose the most powerful man in the world for the upcoming quadrennium. Many of you will have chosen to stick with President Barack Obama, while many others will have decided to give former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney a chance at the job. The two will have spent a record amount trying to earn your vote in this election, about $2 billion according to most estimates. Compared against the 130 million votes cast in the 2008 election, that’s about $15 in spending for each of us. Or so you would think.

Of course, the reality is far from that. You see, unless you live in one of 9 states, the candidates have done next to nothing to win you over. Whether your state is “strong blue” (reliably Democratic) or “certain red” (reliably Republican) on election day, neither Obama nor Romney has held rallies there, run many (if any) TV ads you’ve seen, or really done a thing to convince you they’re the best man to lead the country. The good news is those 9 states look somewhat like the country at large. First, Wisconsin and Ohio represent the industrial Midwest. Then, Colorado and Nevada, examples of the gradual-yet-certain shift away from an America that was nearly 90% white as late as 1940 but is today only 63% populated with non-Hispanic whites. That shift is like a tectonic demographic earthquake that started in California (which became “majority-minority” in 2000) but it’s heading east.

Virginia and North Carolina represent the eastern seaboard; they were breakthroughs for the president in 2008. This time around, they figure to be more competitive. Again, the racial dynamic is at play as Obama is expected to garner 90% of the black vote, a significant majority among Latinos, and to be thumped by Romney among white voters. There are representatives of the small states (New Hampshire and Iowa), and one of the largest, Florida, which arguably is all the phenomena discussed above in microcosm. The one critical common element across all of them: In a country where most states have become more Republican or Democratic, they have stubbornly clung to a more even split among the major parties. Mostly, that’s just a coincidence of geography.

And the other 41 states worth of us who have dare to get “bluer” or “redder”? The candidates’ response amounts to “Not so much.”

This contest is expected to be decided by a razor-thin margin in not just the popular vote but the infamous Electoral College too. We’ve seen squeakers several times in recent elections: George W. Bush vs. Al Gore was decided not by Gore’s 500,000 vote-margin nationally, but instead by about 500 votes in Florida and less than 400 in New Mexico. Had the Bush campaign won over a small town’s worth of voters in the Land of Enchantment, the Florida recount and the Supreme Court intervention would not have mattered at all. In 2004, John Kerry lost by 3 million votes nationally. But had he convinced just 60,000 of Bush’s Ohio voters to select him instead, Kerry would have been elected president.

Close elections didn’t always work this way. A New York Times story titled “The Vanishing Battleground” opens with a brief recalling of the close Kennedy-Nixon race 52 years ago:

Our candidates in 2012 managed to visit one-fifth as many despite each having access to state-of-the-art aircraft. Carl Cannon summed it up nicely at Real Clear Politics:

“Never has so much money been spent,” Obama pollster Joel Benenson told RCP, “in pursuit of so small a group of voters.” Not all that long ago, this country held presidential elections in which the two major party tickets had to compete, and win, in the populous states of California, Texas, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.

The reality is that the Electoral College has become its own sort of deterministic destroyer of the voting power of nearly all Americans in states red and blue, large and small. Romney has millions of supporters in California but no incentive to try to find a million more in the Central Valley here. Obama has — believe it or not — millions of Texans casting votes for him. Yet, he too has no reason to try to motivate the “nth” Austin resident to come out and vote.

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